I was a director of Metaphase Solutions Ltd that used to provider of bespoke web services. Metaphase Solutions closed in Jan 2004 because of market conditions.

I have been Unix programmer and administrator since 1988 when I graduated from Staffordshire University with a degree in IT.

In the past I have worked on several large distrubuted network projects. I am still working some of the time on IPA Systems Ltd's PrintExpress which is a large distrubuted, multithread pre-press system.

I can code in C/C++/Java/Perl and lots of other languages that I have tried to forgot about (including but not limited to Pascal/Ada/Fortran/Prolog/Lisp).

Articles Posted by sarum

Recent blog entries by sarum

I am attempting to create a new N'up Imposition system for IPA and have been folding paper and looking at the results for the last few days. It has cross my mind, 'Is there an algorithm to work out the pages, for any sequence of folds or cuts'?

New OS?

I have been thinking about a hobby OS for the last few months. There are several problems with current designs that have iritated me to say enough is enough. More when I have got something to show.

Aeonworx GPL

One of the companies that I was working on before we gave it all up, has released it's code which Jeff wrote, see: Aeonworx's Unity. Unity is a COM+ based e-commerce package designed for creating enterprise level ecommerce websites.

I have been playing around with awstats to do the web stats for several sites, I looked at the Perl source of awstats and was a bit shocked at it. I was thinking of making some changes to improve the dns caching but I am not sure that I have the time to restructrure the source code as well :( May when I have more time later in the year.

Windows Socket Code

Why does MS not improve there connection code in the sockets lib, this is killing our distrubuted app. I wonder if there is a replacement for WinSock that does not have the connection lag?

Solaris Doors

I made a small change to use Solaris' Doors in some RPC code when on the local machine, I was expect that the would be a small improvement, but I was suprised to see quite a large one. It seams that Doors removed the 'duck into' the kernel and this is quite a noticeable win.

Malloc Lib

In the way that everyone reinvents the wheel because they did not like someone else wheel I wrote a new malloc library. It had the special feature that it returned the memory pages back to the OS when the page was no longer in use. I am working on getting this library release to the public domain. I am not sure how I get it into one of the public libraries but I will cross the bridge when I get permission.

Yes, I am one of those people ... that remembers the days of xlib and was a member of the EXUG. I have always felt a bit removed from the X community since XFree took over after the GreatUnixWar (ie AT&T+Sun vs everyone else) ended spawned the talking shop of the OSF which eat the X Consultium and then did nothing with it.

I will be watch the new developements with xwin.org with intrest.

OpenDCE:

I would realy like to find some free time to help out with this project as it is something that the *nix community should use more of. RPC technology is still the future, Web Services are infact just the same thing using XML as the transport mechanism.

Hobbies:

Things have moved on in our gaming group and we now have a large Wiki site IronFort. I let the old NewGallo site die and moved the information to NewGallo Shared Campaign.

Movies:

Saw Jonny Darko last week, a very intresting film. In a way it's rough edges are what makes the film worth watching.

Life:

It is weird but I am off to the UK SF EasterCon again this year and I notice that it is two years since I posted a diary, does life fly some times.

We have been very bizzy at work porting our
Unix
app
PrintExpress over to NT using MKS's NutCracker
porting software. All seams to be going well and we almost
have all the Base Servers working now. After that we
have the large number of Workflow Servers to do. We
seem to be seeing a slowness in connection setup for
TCP, over what we see on Solaris, is this an NT thing?

I
have
also been attempting to move from MKS's Source Intergrity
7.3a to their new version Vertical Sky's Software
Manager 3.0sp2 this seams to have take up a iritatingly
large amount of my time. I oftern wonder if compaines that
provide this sort of developement tools hve any idea
what 20 Man Year projects are really like.

Hobbies:

My NewGallo
Shared World campaign is going well. Since the 19th Feb
there have been 20 games refereed by 3 different referees
and getting close to 25 different characters. At some stage
I must find the time to update the site as there is a whole
host of player created stuff.

Web:

Our web partnaship has been taking up more and
more of my free time, one of our sites went live with a new
version PDFcreator
and I am working on the CGI to do the site in French,
German, Spainish and Italian. This is at the same time as
attempting to launch a brand new customer's site (more on
this another time). And we seem to have other possiblities
in the pipeline, maybe I can give up my day job some day :-)

Life:

I have just returned from the UK's Annual Easter SF Con.
Four days of nothing but Drink, SF and Good
Company in a fine hotel at cheap rates. Why where you
all not there :-)